The app updates from the last week seem to be all about where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. It has only been a few days since Google Play services 7.8 began rolling out with a couple of location-related bits hidden inside, and now a new version of Maps is hitting the scene with a host of new features centered around our location history. We can now look back through the places we've visited, when we were last at certain spots, and the routes we've taken. There are also a couple of new personalization features that will make our favorite spots a little more accessible.

What's New

Your Timeline

There's a new section in the Maps navigation drawer entitled "Your timeline." It leads to a screen where you can see a fairly detailed history of the places you've been. If you've ever visited Google's Location history page, this is basically the same thing, but massively better. The web page never contained anything more than a bunch of lines and dots strewn about a map, but the new Timeline feature in Maps finally puts some context to the spaghetti-like mess of data that we produce by merely moving around with our phones.

In the Your timeline screen, Maps shows the places you've been, what times you were there, and even how you may have traveled between stops. If you've got any pictures from that time and location in Google Photos, they will also appear in the timeline.

You can choose days either from the dropdown picker in the action bar, or simply swipe left or right on the timeline to switch days.

Your timeline can be incredibly handy if you're trying to remember where you found that cute little restaurant with the great bagels or the random road that lead out to some scenic waterfalls. Let's be honest, this is also the first place you're going to turn when you need an alibi, or the first thing your spouse will demand to see when you're 20 minutes late picking her up from work. Yes, having a GPS tracker on your person is a mixed bag of good and bad, depending on how it's used.

Since Google is mostly guessing about which places you've actually gone to, there can be plenty of mistakes regarding which restaurant or store you may have stepped into. These details can be corrected through edits, or the stop can be erased from history. In fact, if you're concerned with privacy, it's easy to erase a single stop, a whole day, or even your entire location history.

I also noticed some strings during the teardown that suggest we'll be able to pause and resume location history, and also an option to turn on a rolling 90-day window where all history is kept until it gets too old, after which it is removed. I don't believe these options are available yet, but they're certainly coming.

The information from your location history isn't locked away in a single screen, either. It has been spread out to numerous spots throughout the Maps application. If you open "Your places" from the navigation drawer and scroll down almost to the bottom, you'll notice a short list of Places you've been. There is a link to see a longer list, which appears to encompass stops you've made as far back as 12 months ago.

If you check out the detail page on a location you've visited in the past, you'll now see a note to let you know when you last stopped in. After a few days, the message is generalized in weeks and months, so you'll have to work a little harder to get an exact date if you want it. There's also a little question mark to the right that pops up a message to say that any details about your location history are only visible to you.

Custom Names

I've renamed "The Idle Hour" to "The Local Watering Hole"

The details screen has another new addition in the form of an action called "Edit name." It's now possible to attach a custom name to places on the map, sort of like a nickname. In theory, this is meant to give us an easy way to identify places on a map, mostly by creating more recognizable names. In practice, it doesn't seem to be working the way it's intended. Custom names don't show up in search results, and aside from a bluish-gray icon, they aren't really that distinguishable from any other place on a map.

The one useful element of this feature is that locations do show up in "Your places" under the title "Named places." This makes custom names virtually identical to stars (a.k.a. Saved places), but with a slightly higher position on the list.

There may be a few other new things in this release, so let us know in the comments if you see anything else. We've got a post coming up with a neat little Easter Egg, and I'm checking out a couple of other interesting elements from a teardown, so keep an eye open for more.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

Comments

The timeline was already there 3 years ago but then was gone. Welcome back! :)

gumbald

I was thinking this! Even hunted for screenshots of it...

Rod

Most importantly, offline navigation.

Here maps just saved my trip, again.

Google maps was useless in the woods I was lost at, because of lack of cellular reception.

WORPspeed

Here Maps does navigation in woods? Like random routes or does it follow paths in the woods? I mean if there are no paths than even with reception Google maps wouldn't be any good. Which woods were you lost in?

Rod

I didn't make myself clear, sorry.

Of course I wasn't in the jungle.

I was on a trip to southern Brazil, and lost my way between two cities. I got myself in a rural area, with lots of little paths, unpavamented, with no lamps, and there was a dense fog and started to rain.

Luckily, I had downloaded the regional map in HERE before I left home. The paths were shown there and I managed to go back to the road. Must say I was a little scared. Not really a good place to be lost at; nobody in visible sight, pitch black, foggy and raining. Plus, outside temp was close to 2 degrees celcius.

And I mentioned woods, because some places the trees grew really high, covering the path from a satellite look.

WORPspeed

So you didn't even use navigation? You just used the map to get back to the road? Google Maps can do that for you. You can cache large regions of the map to work without a connection. As long as you have GPS you would see your position relative to the road, so you could find it just fine with Google Maps. It's very useful, I use it a lot. It's like a paper map on your phone with an indicator as to where you are (when you have GPS).

Robert Johnson

HERE is vastly more reliable if you get in a real bind like he described. If you've downloaded it, you're more likely to have maps stored on your device from when you chose countries or states to store. Importantly, it's more accurate outside America than Google.

WORPspeed

I had NOKIA maps installed, the one country I wanted to use it: Japan. Nokia Here maps didn;t let me download the map of Tokyo

I uninstalled Nokia Here maps and instead installed Here.Maps which works much better for offline navigation imo

I still use Google maps EVERYWHERE I go, In the Netherlands where I live, USA, Other EU countries, Japan and the map has never failed me (never once had the need to use offline navigation, so while I did download the map for offline navigation in here.maps on my phone I never even used it)

So I wan't to know if the guy I replied to is a Microsoft/nokia shill or an actual user who found a genuine usecase where Google Maps failed him. Because I sure haven't found any.

Rod

Point is, Google Maps require internet connection.

HERE doesn't

WORPspeed

Only for navigation
And for offline navigation here.maps is better than nokia HERE maps imo

Robert Johnson

I'm not a fanboy is all. I know, weird, right. Here is very clearly better in Europe, all the more dramatically the farther east you go. Google did a cute number on me on in central Europe and I learned my lesson. I cross-check with local map services or Here outside the USA.

Yeah, I read about that too. I wonder if that will improve or worsen or stagnate the rate of improvements made to the software.

Didn't know about the numbers thing, that's a nifty little feature.

WORPspeed

Also, the other app I was using. I was calling it maps.here or here.maps, but that's not what it's called.

Was just going over my phone and found that it's called: MAPS.ME
It was the only one out of Google Maps, Nokia HERE and this one that let me download the map of Tokyo for offline use

Just a fix and FYI

Rod

I did navigate.

HERE shows various routes, and I checked the whole area do see what was the best one.

WORPspeed

You were in some woods and needed to get back to a road. How many routes are there....if there are that many, were you actually lost or was it an ALL roads lead to Rome kind of thing, where flipping a coin and deciding based on that would still give you a 80% chance to find the road. The place you linked for you 'supposed' woods are not that hard to navigate if you have that area cached. :S

gumbald

Always wanted something like https://www.getchronos.com/ to be integrated rather than running something separate, this feels like the first step. Just need the web version to get updated now...

Not yet... I tested it a few times and it just never seemed to catch on. I saw that Ron Amadeo had the same experience and posted it on Ars, so I think it's just a legitimate oversight for now. I'm sure that will eventually become part of it, but it's still in the works.

This is data that Police, FBI, & NSA have been able to 'rip' off people's cellphones for a long time. But now we get to use our own data, which is handy.
Frankly, the entire existence of a time-lined map that *you can't turn off* is quite a negative for owning a smartphone. It's also one reason NSA/CIA/FBI love people having smartphones (& Facebook too, but FB isn't specifically for location data).

Also, whether it's a positive or negative depends on a person's personal opinion. Just because you are afraid of privacy issues doesn't mean everyone else is. Actually, considering Facebook and Twitter are things, these days it's more like the average person is actively trying to throw away any semblance of privacy.

Uh, you can't just 'flip a switch' in Settings & shut it off.
You'd have to root your phone, kill the GPS or the file it creates, no?

I'm not sure 99% of people can do that.

operator207

I can turn off the GPS in settings. Hell I can swipe down, then left, and there it is right there, "location". Tap that, and turn it off. I would assume that it does what it says, and turns off the location services.
I believe it does what it says. I have mine set to "Device only", so it only uses GPS and not wifi and cellular. Mainly because my Nexus 5 seems to like to burn through the battery in a couple hours if I have it turned all the way on. Specifically Google Play Services eats the battery.
I value my privacy, though location isn't something I consider 100% privacy related. Unless I am trying to be a ninja, which if you knew me, would be really funny. :)

Roger Siegenthaler

You don't need a smartphone for the FBI/Police to be able to do this, triangulation based on your connected mobile towers is accurate to +- 2 meters.

Farik Carrascal

It relays on the GPS of the cell towers but the 2 meters accuracy is based on the GPS of the phone

I think it's fair to say there is one difference: people know about it now.

Just 2-3 weeks ago I was sitting at a restaurant with a friend and it was taking inordinately long for our food to get out to us. She asked how long we'd been there and I pulled up the location history website to figure it out. When I told her what I was doing, she was surprised it was even possible.

Even a lot of well-informed people had no idea that this data was actually available to us, and it's not like that page was easily discoverable unless you're digging through the Google Privacy Settings Dashboard. This feature is now front-and-center in one of the most heavily used apps on the most widely used mobile OS in the world.

The media coverage is also picking up steam, so don't be surprised if some terrible morning show host talks about this in the next few days and not-so-subtly makes a malformed allusion to Google as Big Brother. (Sorry, those people bother me.)

Anyway, my point is, now that people know this actually is a thing, there will be a lot more attention paid to it. On the other hand, I doubt this will actually be admissible in court since the data can be easily modified. But that spawns a whole separate topic that deserves more than a Disqus comment.

lolote

Sorry i hace a question, is there any way to find contacts in google maps?
like looking for "peter" and google maps show me his house. obviously when I put his address home in contacts
Thanks !

Simps

I think there is a setting in Google+, Google+ lets users share their location with specific friends or circles.

That's not an answer to the question Iolote is asking. If I have a friend named peter saved (Along with his address) in my contacts, how do I navigate to his house using Google Maps? As in "Navigate to Peter's house or Navigate to Peter?"

I believe that is what Iolote is asking and I have no idea how to do that in Google Maps anymore.

Simps

Oh sorry about that.

Cale

It's still there. Start typing the name of the person into the search bar in Google Maps. You can also go to the Contacts app and click the address from there, which will bring up the location in Maps. It doesn't work in Google Voice Search though.

Cool

This is pretty awesome. Especially the list of places you've been to for the last twelve months (I could see that being super useful).

I just sat down for the last half hour looking through a bunch of places that I've been to in the last couple months. It's actually kind of engrossing.

brnpttmn

Yeah, I love the photos and places information interlaced. It'll be interesting to see if they do anymore integration like Google Fit to show when you worked out, Google music integration to show what you were listening to, hangouts/dialer integration to show who you called, talked to, or messaged, calendar to show meetings you had that day, etc, etc, etc.

The timeline is not just shows where you have been, but also include how did you be there and if you took pictures during the day, timeline would combine it too. SUPER COOL. I was conceptualizing about a product do this kind of things a week ago!!

Agreed. I've gone through the old location history page a few times to fix stuff. This is really a problem when I leave one device sitting at home and have another with me, both of which are reporting at the same time. It takes forever to fix stuff when you have to adjust each stop individually.

Martin Fabian

How do I turn the frigging thing off and make sure that google does NOT store anything about my location? Like I would want to be tracked around the world...

If you turn these off, you'll see a message letting you know that certain Google services are less effective without this data (basically, Google Now loses some of its neat tricks), but that won't stop you from using Maps or Navigation fully.

I believe the prompts also link to a place where you can delete all previously collected history. Of course, you can do that right from the Your Timeline screen (and page), as I mentioned in the article.

Generalissimo Pantalones

Does it not bother anyone else that in order to edit a place you have to turn on Search History, and record every grubby little bit of smut you've looked at?

Andro

I am very disappointed about this future...I can't see where my mobile is so accurate like I saw it in an old version of location history...I agree, that the new version shows you the name of the street and many more. But this is not the thing that we want....

In an old version I saw very accurate location of my mobile for every minute of a day. Now you can see just the spots, where you have been for more than an hour....

For example in an old version I had seen almost every step of my girlfriend...I was extremely jealous at the beginning and I got her password of gmail...I was calm and relaxed...when we where not together i simply look on location history and i saw where she was at the moment....

Andro

but know, you can't see the exact location.... :/

doofunkie

Why on earth does this damn map keep saying I'm going to a house the next street over & I'm not. And why is it grey & dark blue. Wth.